The Social Science Research Council is pleased to announce the launch of the newest Research AMP site, the online platform Play and Wellbeing. A project from the Digital Futures Institute x Play Initiative at Teachers College at Columbia University, Play and Wellbeing expands the public and scholarly imagination surrounding play, extending the conversation beyond children’s activities to encompass the broader concept of wellbeing.
This innovative platform uses Research AMP to curate the initiative’s original multimedia digital content, specifically the Pop and Play podcast. The podcast, essay series, and research reviews featured on the platform challenge normative expectations for play in academic work and daily life, aiming to create a paradigm shift in how society perceives and values play.
The team at Teachers College launched the site at a December 1, 2023 symposium hosted by the DFI x Play Initiative, showcasing the Play and Wellbeing alongside a number of other projects that work to expand the public conversation on play as well as mobilize research that generates a broader conversation about play.
The team at Teachers College was one of four grantees of the Research AMP partner sites project, a year-long partnership to develop critical infrastructure for sharing their research using the SSRC’s Research AMP platform. Research AMP is a free, open-source technology for building scholarly communities, collecting research, and sharing insights with new audiences. Research AMP lowers barriers to the dissemination of public scholarship and fills the need to put credible, accessible, and comprehensive scholarship in the hands of expert and lay audiences.
The online tool—developed in collaboration with Digital Scholar and with the support of the Mellon Foundation—allows users to collate and curate academic literature, news articles, blog posts, podcasts, and other work on a single topic into one place. It allows users to add original content like research reviews and articles, to bring the insights stemming from their collected research to new audiences. To learn more and see the other Research AMP sites, go to https://ramp.ssrc.org/.